Getaround, a car-sharing startup, just announced that it is raising $13.9 million in its first round of funding, which includes the likes of Marissa Mayer, Shervin Pishevar and Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors. Getaround has been around for just about a year but hadn't yet raised a lot of money like most startups. That's changing today.

Everyone needs a set of wheels to get from point A to point B. After reviewing sites like BornRich, The L.A. Times and CNET, we found the kind of cars rich tech moguls drive vary from extremely modest to ridiculously expensive. Some choose to be flashy in $100,000 electric sports cars while others are content cruising around in everyday vehicles.

You'll just have to forgive LinkedIn workers for feeling super, super stoked about working at the professional social network right now—especially the youngest, newest ones. Check out these charming and talented LinkedIn interns doing a riff on Fun's "We Are Young," full of nerdy programmer jokes (GitHub repos, anyone?) and references to LinkedIn's hot-selling products, like Pro Account subscriptions.

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and a former governor of Pennsylvania, has been elected chairman of the State Science and Technology Institute's (SSTI) Board of Trustees. As chairman, Ridge will lead the board in providing strategic guidance and oversight of SSTI's operations as the group works to encourage economic growth through science, technology and innovation.

"SSTI focuses on issues central to our nation's competitiveness," said Ridge. "Many of the interests and areas that I'm passionate about, such as rebuilding America's manufacturing sector, align with SSTI's mission. I look forward to helping them advance their goals."

We live in a time of rapid change, thanks to vibrant developments in computer and mobile technology that offer great potential to connect people and access and disseminate tailored information. Smartphones for example are a versatile tool that can give users location info, remind them to do things like, connect with family and friends, help find local information—and of course make calls.

For an aging population – in the US alone, individuals 65 and older numbered 40.3M in 2010 and will grow to 72 million by 2030, according to the Administration on Aging’s “Aging Statistics 2011” – these developments promise to help people stay active and connected to friends, family and support network, as well as make healthcare more cost-effective.

For any startup founder, the first few months are an uphill battle.

During this time, it's crucial to develop a solid infrastructure that will protect your intellectual property, manage complex data systems, and ensure that you can scale up without any major glitches. It's a daunting task.

Behavior is the unknowable variable in every innovation, and it is the variable that most determines the opportunity a new business model has to evolve and take advantage of the new behavior.

It's The Behavior, Stupid

We are at the tail end of an era that has focused almost entirely on the innovation of products and services, and we are at the beginning of a new era that focuses on the innovation of what I like to call "behavioral business models." These models go beyond asking how we can make what we make better and cheaper, or asking how we can do what we do faster. They are about asking why we do what we do to begin with. And the question of why is almost always tied to the question of how markets behave.

Did you know that the first business incubator was started in Batavia, N.Y., in 1956? Joseph Mancuso was the founder, and after seeing newly hatched chicks running around from one of his portfolio companies, he coined the business “incubator”. From there on out business incubators started gaining popularity. There are currently 1,200 in the U.S. They have caught the attention of local governments and universities interested in retaining entrepreneurial talent. An example of this is LaunchHouse’s partnership with the city of Shaker Heights.

Thanks to popular sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, crowdfunding is now commonplace. They’re the platforms musicians turn to, to release their first CD, or where local alumni pray to break their initial $18,000 fundraising goal in just 25 hours. Although started for today’s creatives, however, crowdfunding’s begun to to take a turn for the educational. Because if you can crowdfund art, why not crowdfund academic research?

Earlier this year, Denny Luan launched Microryza, a website that allows others to give money to research they care about. From bringing a triceratops to Seattle or developing Omnioff, a non-toxic alternative to Teflon non-stick cookware, the platform runs the gamut of research projects. Many of which might not receive funding elsewhere. As the Microryza team writes:

Stephanie Hamilton is part of something larger than herself. She's part of a computer program.

The 38-year-old resident of Kingston, Jamaica, recently began performing small tasks assigned to her by an algorithm running on a computer in Berkeley, California. That software, developed by a startup called MobileWorks, represents the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren't yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts.

By assigning such tasks to people in emerging economies, MobileWorks hopes to get good work for low prices. It uses software to closely control the process, increasing accuracy by having multiple workers perform every task. According to company cofounder Anand Kulkarni, the aim is to get the crowd of workers to "behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings."

A couple of years ago, I was facilitating an idea generation session with an internal client recently demoted into a marketing management job. We were providing strategic help to develop the marketing plan for his new product line. His unwillingness to productively participate, a refusal to consider anyone else’s ideas, and his negative management style during the idea generation session made it clear there was no assistance he would accept.

“I’m a strategy guy, and I’m here to help you.”

Photo by: steffne | Source: photocase.com The thing is, if it’s within my abilities, I love providing strategic help to someone to do things better and more successfully. As a result, we spent all morning trying one strategic thinking exercise after another to generate new ideas for his product line. It was clear though we were not making progress in providing strategic help to him.

Richard Bendis and Nish Acharya will talk about the innovation and entrepreneurship programs in Federal Government today. Nish will also discuss briefly the status of the EDA i6 competition and the noticeable increase in the quality of the proposals.

They will speak about the paradigm shift in the EDA programs from a "Bricks and Mortar" focus (hard) to a more innovative programmatic focus (soft) on innovation, commercialization and entrepreneurship.

For the past decade, my colleagues and I have helped more than 150 social entrepreneurs from all over the world hone their business plans, which they are able to pitch for 15 exhilarating minutes to Silicon Valley financiers and executives.   Through our ten years running this mentoring program, called the Global Social Benefit Incubator, we’ve culled some top tips for anyone looking to develop their business plan and pitch it to potential funders or partners:

1.         Prove that you know how your customers make decisions.  Virtually every social venture we counsel asks its customers to change entrenched behaviors and make a different decision for spending their precious dollars:  to pay for clean water instead of making do with dirty water; pay a few pennies for sanitary pads rather than stay home five days a month; invest in clean solar lights that initially cost more than toxic kerosene. Understanding how such customers or beneficiaries decide to spend – or not spend – can be one of the biggest challenges for any kind of venture.   What will prove persuasive to get them to change? What evidence do you have that they will change? 

Based in the old communist era telephone company building, Eleven Accelerator Venture Fund has launched with €12 million. The money comes from the European Union’s Jeremie, the Joint European Resources for Micro to Medium Enterprises, which is almost an acronym.

Tech Crunch says that Eleven has some impressive partners, including Springboard and Google.

“Targeting teams in Central and Eastern Europe (although, interestingly, the accelerator will accept applications from anywhere), Eleven is offering startups €50,000 in funding for 10-15% of equity with a remit to help them go from discovery to validation, taking them past an initial MVP to be seed and series A investment ready. To that end, a follow on seed investment of €150,000 will be on offer to around one third of the graduating startups for up to an additional 15% equity — so the opportunity really is their’s to lose.”

Jeff Bussgang asks an interesting question on his blog.

He suggests that the lack of NYC tech IPOs compared to Boston is a result of:

The IPO culture hasn’t fully permeated NYC?  There are only very few public technology companies based in NYC:  I count AOL as the only one with > $1 billion market capitalization, whereas Boston has 30-35 innovation economy companies with greater than > $1 billion market capitalization.  Perhaps Boston CEOs, CFOs and boards feel more pressure to go public sooner and/or are comfortable with the IPO process because they community has done it so many times.  Honestly, this theory doesn’t totally resonate with me as NYC is the heart of Wall Street – all the relevant bankers, accountants and advisors are there.  If any technology hub can build a strong middle market public company ecosystem, it should be NYC.

Every startup founder feels the pressure of the thousands of things that need to get done, all seemingly at the same time. There is just not enough time! The real solution is better productivity and less procrastination, to put you back in control of your business. You need to spend time on important things, as well as the urgent.

Many entrepreneurs waste too much time on low-priority administrative tasks, procrastinating on higher priority but tougher tasks, resulting in last minute crises, and failure to complete the critical work that people are really expecting of them. We all know people who profess to be stressed out and “so busy” that they never have time for anything – yet they never seem to get things done.

While scanning the news just moments ago this article caught my eye. Human immortality could be possible by 2045, say Russian scientists. Interesting subject? Yes, but one sentence towards the end contains two extremely important points for capital raisers. Here’s the sentence:

Now, Itskov is asking the world’s richest people for help in financing the project. What are the two points? Well, if you are going to chase investors you really should know two things. One is who has money to invest? Two, who has the genuine incentive to back your project? The incentive can be either a need or a desire for it.

John Goscha was living in Babson College’s “e-tower” with 20 other aspiring undergrad ­entrepreneurs in 2002. The students were ­constantly flinging out new business ideas and scribbling them on oversize pads of paper they’d hung from the walls. It was wasteful and messy, but whiteboards were expensive. Then it struck Goscha: Why couldn’t you make paint that also functioned as a dry erase board?

Ten years later Goscha’s creation, IdeaPaint, is distributed in 20 countries. The company has 35 employees and approximately $20 million in annual sales, but it might have been stillborn if it weren’t for Goscha’s alma mater. “IdeaPaint wouldn’t have been possible without Babson,” Goscha says, noting that the majority of his professors had been entrepreneurs themselves. Some even became early-stage investors in the company.

A new bill introduced in the House of Representatives attempts to deter frivolous patent litigation by forcing unsuccessful patent plaintiffs to cover defendants' legal costs. Introduced by Rep. Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and co-sponsored by Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT), the Saving High-Tech Innovators from Egregious Legal Disputes (SHIELD) Act is limited to patents related to computer hardware and software.

"Patent trolls don't create new technology and they don't create American jobs," DeFazio said in a news release. "They pad their pockets by buying patents on products they didn't create and then suing the innovators who did the hard work and created the product."

As might be expected, the report found that both small business borrowers and lenders were less active in 2011 than in 2010, with both sides cautious about either taking on debt or extending capital in a still-shaky economy.

This report’s data are based on the size of the loan, not the size of the business, so it defines “small business loans” as those under $1 million. Within that number, loans are further broken down into “macro business loans” (between $100,000 and $1 million) and “micro business loans” (under $100,000).